Fur: A Sensitive History, Jonathan Faiers

Fur: A Sensitive History offers a richly illustrated and provocative meditation on one of fashion’s most sensuous and contested materials. Traversing centuries and continents, the book explores fur’s cultural entanglements—its role as a signifier of power, beauty, intimacy, and cruelty. Organised into five tactile themes—Hair, Pelt, Coat, Skin, and Fleece—Faiers moves deftly from Arctic exploration to 1930s couture salons, from medieval symbolism to the digital age of faux-fur, asking us to consider not just what fur means, but how it feels.

More textile study than polemic, the volume is sumptuous in both scholarship and design. Archival imagery, film stills, and fashion photography sit beside lyrical analysis, revealing how fur inhabits a space between comfort and discomfort, elegance and exploitation. Faiers does not shy away from complexity—examining the emotional and ecological weight of both natural and synthetic furs. What emerges is a textured portrait of a material that clings, not only to skin, but to memory, desire, and cultural identity.

“The volume lives up to the sensory nature of the subject and is attractively designed and illustrated with extensive colour and black and white photographs…This makes the book a pleasure to look at and read, while the juxtaposition of images from different time periods and disciplines inspires reflection and comparisons.”—Danielle Sprecher, Journal of Design History

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About the Author
Jonathan Faiers is Professor of Fashion Thinking at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where he specialises in the cultural and emotional resonance of dress and textile. With a background in film and visual culture, his work bridges disciplines, drawing attention to the sensory, symbolic, and often contradictory nature of fashion and material objects.

Publication date: 2020
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780300227208